Attempts to make portable data processing systems smaller have been limited by the size of the standard keyboard as an input device. In order to create still smaller portable systems, electronics designers have developed handprint recognition systems (HPR systems). These systems are designed to recognize handprinted characters and to translate them into character data recognizable by conventional applications programs. A variety of input devices have been developed such as digital touch pads, electrostatic and electromagnetic pens, current injection pens, and the like. All these devices are capable of sensing handprinted characters and outputting digital data to a processor. The processor must then receive the data to the input device and translate it into conventional character data that can be used by applications programs such as spread sheets, word processing programs, and the like.
A wide variety of HPR algorithms have been developed that can accurately and efficiently perform the recognition and translation function in a general purpose processor. However, the real time recognition of handwriting is a computationally intensive activity for a general processor. The recognition process involves a series of steps for each stroke performed by the user of the system which essentially ties up all of the processing capability of the processor performing the recognition algorithm. Accordingly, the processor is not free to perform any other tasks while the user of the system is inputting handwritten information. The complexity of the recognition process differentiates handprinted input from other, more conventional, forms of input such as keyboard entries. In keyboard entries, a general purpose processor can quickly ascertain the character being input and can perform other tasks while the keyboard data entry process is proceeding.
Accordingly, a need has arisen for a data processing system which incorporates a handprint recognition accelerator system to perform the handprint recognition process in the background mode and supply a general purpose processor with conventional character data.